Tár (2022)

Rated R for more concept than actual visuals.  The protagonist is a bad person.  She says awful things and uses people as things.  As part of that, there's sexual manipulation and gaslighting ultimately leading to the suicide of one of the characters.  It's a bleak movie that is meant to make the protagonist pretty unlikable.  R.

DIRECTOR: Todd Field

Again, if the vibe is to go with bleak movies, we have this one.  For the sake of simplicity, when you see Tár written out, know that I'm copying and pasting it.  When I talk about the character, Lydia Tar, please forgive the lack of accent because I get so frustrated with that.  I can't have two things ready to copy.  (Note, when I copy something, I can't change it from italicized to not-italicized easily).  

I was prepped to be obsessed with this movie. A while ago, Patton Oswalt retweeted a compilation video of the best movies from this year. One of the binding elements of the montage was footage from Tár, mainly because it was set to an amazing score and they used the scoring scenes to really stress the importance of music in film.  Cool.  I got behind it.  These shots of Cate Blanchett scoring a hodgepodge of great movies got me jazzed to watch all of these movies, most of which I'm watching with this attempt to catch up before the Academy Awards.  The reality of the situation is one that is quite different. Honestly, the montage video used this footage of Lydia conducting almost more effectively than the film itself did.  Maybe it's because I want Tár to be a movie that it doesn't want to be.  I wanted this to be a music movie, about the role of the artist and the passion that comes from the nuance of music.  You know, Whiplash. I think I realized that I wanted it to be Whiplash when I started quoting Whiplash over Tár.  For sure, it was to be funny.  But it didn't change the fact that I wanted it to be Whiplash.

I read a New York Times review of Tár that was pretty damning.  I was most impressed that the author of the article pointed out that a colleague from the New York Times was in the movie as himself.  Is this pointed out to make the review feel especially harsh.  Now, the New York Times pointed out that this movie seemed to be an attempt to take down cancel culture. Read their article.  I'm doing it an injustice by leaving it at that, but I'm working in jists right now.  Yeah, Tár is a takedown of cancel culture.  But I don't know if that's completely accurate.  One read of the movie could be that it is aggressively anti-cancel culture. After all, there is the almost over-the-top scene where Lydia destroys a Julliard student for having poltiical preferences over the choices of symphonies performed.  These are in the halcyon hours of the film, where Lydia can be written off as simply a bit eccentric or empassioned.  If Lydia had spent the majority of the movie doing good work and it was that moment that brought her down, then I would agree with the New York Times that this is a movie about the power of cancel culture.

But do you know what is really going on?  Lydia sucks all around.  One of the myths of cancel culture is that someone makes one mistake and their entire career is in the trash.  No, most of the people who are cancelled have a long and continued history of being human garbage and that's why they eventually get cancelled.  Hey, this is quasi-timely (despite the fact that I'm writing this way before I'm going to publish this).  Let's look at Scott Adams, the newest "victim" of cancel culture.  Scott Adams has often been pretty outspoken about his conservative politics.  Yet, he has made bank off of his Dilbert comic strip.  I don't get it.  I wanted to like Dilbert, but most Sunday morning funnies aren't that funny.  (Sorry, the handful of ones that I really like.)  But Adams kept pushing that button and kept pushing that button until he said something that was once again beyond the pale. Lydia Tar isn't a moment of isolation when it comes to stuff against her.  If anything, she's woefully naive about what it means to be in the spotlight.  I don't think that Lydia Tar is Scott Adams.  I think that Lydia Tar is Joss Whedon or Kevin Spacey.

Lydia's sexuality plays a major part in her character's choices.  From moment one, the notion that she is a lesbian defines her.  In her rant against the student, she calls herself a "U-Haul Lesbian", meaning that she latches onto relationships very quickly.  (Thank you, Urban Dictionary.)  The typical crowd who bemoan cancel culture are white men.  It's obvious why.  For centuries (I wanted to write "millennia", but that might be a bit much for me to prove), white men have gone borderline uncriticized by any demographic.  Telling the story of an alternate universe Lawrence Tar would have seemed too try-hard, wouldn't it?  Instead, there's the spectre of cancel culture that can get anyone, including a U-Haul Lesbian.  Tar acts like she can get away with murder in a lot of these cases.  While there is a difference between suicide and murder, the film almost intentionally blurs the line between the two.  The movie makes the direct correlation between Lydia's actions and Krista's death.  Sure, Krista comes across as intense, but that's because she can trace all the negatives that come to her to Lydia.

We actually know the truth of what's going on not through Krista herself, but through Francesca.  What Tár absolutely nails is that Lydia is an unreliable narrator.  From her perspective, she is this tortured genius who does a lot of things right.  She is a spouse and a mother.  She may do some morally questionable things, like threaten a childhood bully when she abuses her kid.  But these moments are, from Lydia's perspective, all towards good.  After all, she creates beautiful music.  She is a teacher, spreading her talents to the next generation of artists.  If it was only Lydia's perspective, there could be some sympathy for her erratic behavior or her missteps. But it is through Francesca that we understand that everything that Lydia does is a game. Lydia is a master manipulator, gaslighting those around her and I wonder if she is even conscious of when she does it.  I think that Lydia (as a battle between id, ego, and superego) knows what she comes across as.  I know that she also makes conscious choices to ruin other people's lives. But these are blips on a radar that is overall, from her selfish perspective, morally justified.  

It's Francesca's need to get ahead that highlights Lydia's narcissism.  It sounds like Francesca's the bad guy based on that sentence, but I'm talking about a genuine need.  She has worked hard in a position that seems fairly thankless.  She has been treated almost as a sexual creature (the movie toys around with the notion that Lydia and Francesca had a relationship with Krista), biting her lip when Lydia decides to ignore the clear history between them for her own successes.  But we see that Lydia's entire relationship with Francesca is one of baiting the line.  When Lydia asks Francesca to make a list of candidates and to include her own name on this list, there's this almost withholding attitude.  From Francesca's perspective, Lydia is giving her conflicting messages.  There's the interpretation that Lydia is being professional and needing to interview multiple people, but cheekily winking at Francesca.  There's also the knowledge that Lydia is an awful human being and willing to torment the one person who is nearest to her.  That moment is a choice.  

It's also a choice that I kind of want to unpack.  Part of me thinks that Tar is a creature of survival.  She isn't a long-term schemer.  She is someone who does what she does in the moment and consequences are for later dates.  There is a manic quality to the things she does throughout the film.  Let's use the example of Francesca's job as our foundation.  If she is a creature of instinct, avoiding the immediate small damage for greater danger in the future, then the choice to say "Feel free to include your own name, of course", then a lot of scenes kind of make sense.  Tar's recurring problem is that she tends to #metoo a lot of women into places of power. Her relationship with Olga might be the most telling version of that.  She is this girl who is visibly attractive and has zoomer fame.  She's new; she's hip; she's trendy.  But she's a reflection of Krista.  I even get the vibe that Sharon is a version of Krista, just aged to a place of being a cover for Tar's real life.  When Lydia drives like a psychopath, it's because her triage has caught up with her.  That delayed expectation is now priority and it is hard to deal with.

Maybe the New York Times thinks that the message of cancel culture is too simple on the part of Tár.  Again, even from someone who didn't love it, I still liked it.  Maybe the complaint is that there's more to explore because I don't buy the Julliard student scene as an all-encompassing damnation of Lydia Tar.  It's just very telling.  Lydia keeps burying herself and burying herself and she ultimately ends up cancelling herself.  The movie keeps presenting Tar with outs that she continues not to take.  She has a publicity team.  We see them towards the end of the movie.  That publicity team advises her to intentionally be picky with her projects.  The idea is that she isn't cancelled; she's elite.  Okay.  But when the movie ends on the Monster Hunter children's orchestra, all of the things that happen to her are her own fault.  The world wants to see Tar succeed.  What Lydia doesn't understand is that people want her to be this big deal.  She's an EGOT and people want to work with an EGOT.  They just don't want her to suck.  

But she does suck.  Absolutely, Lydia sucks as a human being.  One could say that she sacrifices everything for the sake of the music, but as I stated, this isn't necessarily even a music movie. It's about the cult of celebrity and the lines that are crossed for the sake of popularity.  Now.  That all ties me back to my original point.  Do I want the movie to be this?  I don't know.  I mean, it's kind of wanting a drama to be a comedy.  It's stupid to complain about.  It's a story that works.  As a guy who thinks that cancel culture is just a whiny way of saying "consequences", I think the movie agrees with me.  But, unfortunately, I'm probably going to forget the movie in a few years.